The Alert Circle: Who Will Lead America?

In the thrum and haul of it, I wake early. Walk to the green, breathe into the sun. Books, literary citizenship, uplifting marginalized voices: our smudge of resistance against erasure.

When a 5.2-magnitude earthquake hit Southern California on April 14th, the members of the African elephant herd at the San Diego Wild Animal Park circled their babies in what is known as an “alert circle.” This occurs when elephants perceive a threat and choose to prioritize the safety of their young.

I like to think that good leadership is about knowing when to form an alert circle.

A great leader is said to have seven qualities: Communication, Integrity, Adaptability, Emotional Intelligence, Vision, Self Awareness, and Accountability.

Wangari Maathai was such a person. A Kenyan-born environmental activist, she dedicated her life to conservation, women’s rights, and democracy. She founded the Green Belt Movement, an organization that planted over thirty million trees in Kenya and its surrounding borders. She won a Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights advocacy.

She created a vision, formed a coalition, adapted it as necessary, used her emotional intelligence and self-awareness to carry that vision forward with her community, and held herself and her community accountable for mistakes. We all make mistakes. She believed that women in Africa must have a voice, must have rights, must not be trampled.

“You cannot enslave a mind that knows itself,” she said.

Consider our own country:

We could start with Bill Clinton, a compromised president. Not a great leader. He was a good communicator, but he lacked self-awareness, accountability, and integrity.

The DNC rigged against Bernie Sanders. Lack of Integrity.

We have our beloved Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who, through some hubris, did not step down, and we ended up with Amy Coney Barrett. Despite her lifelong fight for women’s rights, Ginsberg’s final choice was not a leadership decision made with self-awareness.

Then we have Biden. The most important leadership decision on his plate was to ensure the next president would provide good leadership. Given his age, it was amazing that he made it to the presidency, but it was clear that he should only be president for one term. On day one, he should have been preparing for the primary and getting ready to support his successor.

Kamala didn’t have a chance to mount a campaign, and she might not have been the right candidate. We will never know because Biden couldn’t step out of the way and give anyone the chance to find out. Under the circumstances, she tried.

Leadership includes self-awareness. Biden failed that test. He failed integrity. He failed accountability to the American people. He failed vision. He wasn’t in the alert circle. He was looking in the mirror when the earthquake happened. And it has happened.

Which brings us to the leadership mess we are in. The 47^th communicates by lying, and his press secretary lies for him, along with the rest of his team. Integrity was gone a long time ago, and somehow, it is growing scarcer.

If you think adaptability is treating tariffs like windshield wipers, then you’re wrong. Adaptability in great leaders is having a positive mindset and embracing growth and new technologies. It’s listening and responding. It’s prioritizing the needs of those you are accountable for serving.

Emotional intelligence is not something the 47^th has, so he uses anger, fear, and bullying. That’s why he mocks people with disabilities. It’s why he’s prone to cruel nicknames. He has called women fat pig, slob, disgusting animals. No emotional intelligence. Just cruelty.

As far as having a vision? People around him have a vision, albeit a frightening one. Stephen Miller has a vision to make America white. J.D. Vance has a vision of a patriarchal America. The 47^th has a lot of random ideas but no clear vision of what America will become through his choices.

As for self-awareness, he lacks that. Self-awareness means understanding your strengths, weaknesses, and emotions and their effects on others. A great leader questions whether he/she/they are doing the right thing for the people they are representing. Is this the right thing for the community? For America? Those with self-awareness are not living in a bubble where you spout out orders, and people scurry to act on them. You are in conversation with your team, not acting as dictator.

The accountability factor is substantial. Every week, a great leader says, Is this working? Maybe you are taking risks. Are they working? Are they worth it? A leader has to take ownership of their actions and their consequences. That is not something the 47^th has ever done.

Let me come back to the alert circle. As a leader of a small organization, I like to think that I am working toward the qualities of a great leader. It’s easy to be angry, to feel small, to feel like one’s hard work is invisible. But great leaders aren’t trying to show off—they are working on behalf of the group towards a greater good.

Sometimes, we are in the middle of the alert circle, looking up at the large elephants around us. Some of us are the alert circle. We feel the risk, the danger, and we form a circle around those more vulnerable until the danger passes. I like to think of the elephants bunched together, trunks facing out toward the threat, small elephants in the middle.

Bison and wildebeest also form alert circles. In the case of bison, it is the female bison who form the circles. When the white men began the Westward expansion, there were an estimated 50 million bison. By the turn of the century, those female bison had formed an alert circle over and over in vain, and only about a thousand bison were left of the millions.

Failure of vision.

We cannot walk backward. We can only walk forward. Like Wangari Maathai, we can create great vision, work towards a sustainable future. Plant trees. Save animals. Protect our communities. Keep literary culture, art, and the humanities alive.

With billionaires controlling the supply chain, there isn’t room to breathe. But every day, I hope that Red Hen will receive a transformative gift that will allow us to keep publishing books in this inhospitable climate. We ride the train of risk and believe in magic. In the thrum and haul of it, I wake early. Walk to the green, breathe into the sun.

The struggle, glory, and wild of it is every day. Books, literary citizenship, uplifting marginalized voices: our smudge of resistance against erasure.